Identification of Promoted Eclipse Unstable Interfaces Using Clone Detection Technique
Identification of Promoted Eclipse Unstable Interfaces Using Clone Detection Technique is a scholarly work, published in 2018 in ''International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications''. The main subjects of the publication include agile software development, eclipse, identification, log analysis, software engineering, clone, and computer science. The Eclipse framework is a popular and widely used framework that has been evolving for over a decade.The framework provides both stable interfaces (APIs) and unstable interfaces (non-APIs).Despite being discouraged by Eclipse, client developers often use non-APIs which may cause their systems to fail when ported to new framework releases.To overcome this problem, Eclipse interface producers may promote unstable interfaces to APIs.However, client developers have no assistance to aid them to identify the promoted unstable interfaces in the Eclipse framework.We aim to help API users identify promoted unstable interfaces.We used the clone detection technique to identify promoted unstable interfaces as the framework evolves.the authors' empirical investigation on 16 Eclipse major releases presents the following observations.First, authors have discovered that there exists over 60% non-API methods of the total interfaces in each of the analyzed 16 Eclipse releases.Second, authors have discovered that the percentage of promoted non-APIs identified through clone detection ranges from 0.20% to 10.38%.